Best of 2006

10. Little Miss Sunshine
9. The Queen
8. Pan’s Labyrinth
7. Venus
6. Water
5. Dreamgirls
4. Volver
3. Babel
2. Half Nelson
1. United 93

Honorable Mention: Little Children; An Inconvenient Truth; The Devil Wears Prada; The Departed

Blood Diamond

Grade: C+

Every once in a blue moon I feel guilty about not recommending a movie with so much talent, import and earnestness that I truly wish it were a better film.

But I won’t lose any sleep over it.

Diamond smuggling and civil unrest in the African nation of Sierra Leone form the backdrop of this action adventure, civics lesson melodrama. A father is ripped from his family by revolutionaries to work in a diamond mine; a debonair, swaggering, and disinterested mercenary trades guns to anyone with cash and diamonds to wealthy and evil conglomerates; a teenage boy is kidnapped and brainwashed into becoming the very thing that has torn his family asunder; and a female news reporter wants to make the world a better place.

Armed with this information, you now have an hour to write the screenplay. Take out your number two pencils and begin. Figure out the most pat and predictable answers to the following questions:

• Does the mercenary have a story of a brutalized childhood that may explain his own heartlessness? Say, a raped and murdered mother and father strung up and killed in the family barn?
• Will the reporter lecture us incessantly on the plight of civil unrest in Africa and American culpability?
• Will the mercenary ultimately sacrifice all and demonstrate his hidden humanity and heart of gold?
• Will the mercenary and reporter fall for one another?
• Will the father find his family among millions of refugees scattered throughout the nation?
• Will he rescue his son before all hope of reconciliation and redemption are lost?
• Will the evil corporate conglomerate get away will their devilish doings?
• Will there be African music sung by a boy’s choir in the background?
• Will a black hand grasp out to a white hand to ensure no one falls off a mountain?
• Will the native African get to tell his story in front of a room full of white people after receiving cheers and a standing ovation from the admiring crowd?
• Will the reporter look on with tears in her eyes?

Okay then. Once you’ve finished your first draft, sprinkle in the kind of lines no human being has ever or will ever say to one another. Some suggestions might be:

“Some say the earth is so red because of all the blood that has been spilt upon it.”

“People back home wouldn’t buy a ring for their finger if they knew it cost someone a hand.”

“Sometimes I wonder if God will ever forgive us for what we’ve done to each other. Then I realize God left this place a long time ago.”

"You think I am a devil, but only because I have lived in hell."

“Go ahead and kill me. I am dead already.”

Leonardo DiCaprio is a fine and charismatic actor, and the time has come for people to take him seriously and stop thinking of him as just another pretty face (although he is that as well). He equips himself with an African accent quite nicely and, while a touch too Hollywood butch when shooting people in the head and trying to be menacing, he commands the screen with leading man presence and talent.

And, yes, he does take his shirt off. But only once.

Few do righteous indignation (you know, the sort where you start to cry ‘cause you’re so pissed off?) better than Djimon Hounsou, although a comedy might be a good next step in his career. There is virtually no chemistry whatsoever between DiCaprio and news reporter Jennifer Connelly, which of course doesn’t stop them from holding hands and making goo goo eyes at one another.

The film is long but nicely paced and beautifully filmed, the vistas are stunning and emotive, and many scenes of intense action are well interwoven with introspective and quieter moments. The story itself is quite compelling, our role in such international devastation quite maddening, but piousness and predictability ultimately win the day.

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0450259/

Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno)

Grade: A-

Macabre to the point of grotesque, fanciful to the point of cinematic magic, writer/director Guillermo del Toro’s tour de force story of a young girl’s physical and spiritual escape from fascism is both weighed down by the reality of a dark, evil world and uplifted by a realm of existence that may lie beyond the cruelty of humankind.

Ivana Baquero gives the most complex child performance of the year, her huge brown eyes as filled with pain and terror as they are by simplicity and wonder. As a girl brought by her pregnant mother to live with a heartless and masochistic stepfather/army commander during the oppressive dictatorship of 1944 Spain, her beloved collection of fairy tales provides a survival mechanism that may or may not exist only in her mind. The world she discovers is as frightening and ghoulish as the world in which she lives, but it also provides the porthole to a much better place. Maribel Verdu displays tenderness and fearlessness with equal measure as a member of the resistance movement residing right under the commander’s nose, and Sergi Lopez breaks down the caricature and delivers a man who relishes torture yet is equally concerned with his personal legacy.

Riveting, thrilling, challenging and audacious, Del Toro’s brilliance lies in his ability to paint surreal landscapes on multiple planes of reality. The brutality of the earth is likely to make one wince in horror and watch hypnotized through spread fingers, yet it is a world portrayed as if through the lens of a funhouse mirror – gunshots jolt yet never rip through flesh quite as realistically as expected, blood flows yet never as freely as one would anticipate. Conversely, his underworld is surprisingly fiendish and horrific, and not quite the fantastical escape imagined or prepared for. Our heroine may be retreating into the recesses of her stories, but she may also be in a karmic battle for her soul. Del Toro allows us to decide this for ourselves, providing a storytelling balance that makes us doubt and believe in both worlds simultaneously. As with all great works, one leaves the theater with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the beliefs, worldviews and personal truths we have brought with us into the theater in the first place. Different minds will no doubt view the film’s meaning and message in very different lights, and the screenplay is so skillful you may not realize another perspective even exists.

A breathtaking, vibrating score by Javier Navarrete thrills and chills to the bones, and bewitching cinematography by Guillermo Navarro uses dark, brooding tones to radiate light. Visual effects terrify in wonderment.

Freedom and oppression are concepts of the mind, body and spirit. Del Toro captivates and enthralls in his ability to ruminate and illuminate in each one of these dimensions.
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More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0457430/

Letters from Iwo Jima

Grade: F/DWR*

Yes, you read correctly, so wipe your eyes, take a look at the grade again, and know I’m completely serious. It’s not that I loathe Clint Eastwood personally, it’s only that I find so many of his films so stultifyingly over-rated.

If you can accept the radical and revelatory notion that the Japanese are people too, give yourself a gold star. They have loved ones, hopes and dreams of their own. They want to live. They want to survive war. They do not want to die. If you prick them, they too indeed bleed.

Jesus H. we get it already.

Every character is a Hollywood war cliché, only this time in Japanese with appallingly stilted and melodramatic subtitles. Paul Haggis, screenwriter of last year’s equally excruciating, pretentious, cliché-ridden and over-lauded “Crash” wrote the story on which the screenplay is based here, which explains a great deal indeed. The all-knowing, compassionate and noble general who respects and regards his men, the sadistic platoon leader who hates his men and who hate him back, the former Olympian horse racer who now rides atop his gallant steed on the beaches of Iwo Jima (gee, do you think the horse is gonna’ make it to the end of the movie?) the young soldier who leaves his wife and unborn child to fight for his country (I swear to God, there’s even a scene where he speaks into the mother’s belly and promises a safe return) the quiet, new recruit with a secret and a story of his own (not to worry, we find out in flashback he crapped out of the military academy for refusing to shoot a family’s dog).

Some of this stuff you just can’t make up.

Every hackneyed scene has been done ad infinitum since the days of “Birth of a Nation,” from comrades reading aloud syrupy letters from home (always containing a mention of how the farm animals are doing) unlikely conversations between soldiers on opposing sides (“I spent a great deal of time in California when I was younger,” the Japanese commander tenderly tells a fallen American. “Where are you from?” You just know the answer can only be Iowa, Oklahoma, or Kansas – wounded soldiers are never from Miami) to walkie-talkie communications going dead at pivotal moments to blinded leaders telling their men to bravely soldier on before committing suicide.

And then there’s that dialogue. Taglines about the “evil enemy approaching,” speeches straight out of “Henry V” and the Battle of Agincourt, diatribes about how the enemy’s key weakness is he will “risk the lives of many to save the life of one” intermingle with specifically Japanese mottos about “dying with honor” and seeing each other in the afterlife. It’s all drecky Hollywood screenwriting at its most painful, flowing embarrassingly out of the mouths of actors heroically trying to take it all in stride.

The film has an appropriate black, white and gray palate, with flashes of red (the circle on the Japanese flag and lots of splashing blood on walls and people’s faces, just to make clear war is hell) flagrantly stolen from Steven Spielberg’s girl in the red coat in “Schindler’s List.” Nicely computer-generated battle scenes are flagrantly stolen from the opening of Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” The film ends with a flash forward to today, flagrantly stolen from Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" and/or "Schindler's List."

Happily, there is no child flying over the moon on a bicycle.

The score (perhaps thankfully) makes no attempt to capture anything remotely ethnic, but instead has ominous piano-tinkling tones better served in a mystery whodunit. If one is fortunate enough to see the film in stereo, bullets will indeed fly all around you.

As my partner so eloquently stated about six hours into this 2 hour and 21 minute deadly dull extravaganza, and I quote:

“Dreamgirls got fucked.”

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*For those unfamiliar with this particular designation, DWR (which stands for "Danger, Will Robinson") is used to indicate pretentious, self-congratulatory, holier-than-thou or otherwise self-important dreck that nevertheless manages to garner significant critical praise. I am considering changing this designation to IEFS for "Is Ebert Fu#king Serious?"

More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0498380/

Venus

Grade: A-

GIVE THE MAN A BLOODY OSCAR ALREADY!

It is to weep how fine a thespian Peter O’Toole is. It would be untrue to say this is the finest in a truly illustrious career, equally unfair to suggest attention must be paid to a fading star in the twilight of his career. As an aged actor with the body of an old man and the heart of a 20 year old, O’Toole is humble, foulmouthed, tender, rip-roaring, charismatic, raunchy and terribly vulnerable. He remains one of the finest working actors of our time, and a star in a class by himself.

Anyone who has ever suffered the indignity of a prostate exam knows there comes a time in one’s life when outside frailty no longer matches internal youth. It is a shock to one’s system to realize not everyone sees us for the juvenile, insecure, sexual, playful beings we remain all of our lives, and O’Toole displaces the frustrated curmudgeonly attitude of assorted mates with his own brand of chagrined acknowledgement and flippant acceptance. The soul of the film lies between O’Toole and the equally wonderful Leslie Phillips, lifelong chums who literally and figuratively dance their way through life together. One suspects a one-sided love even greater than mere friendship, but the film is so rich in its subtlety and grace that the gentle affection between these two men only shines more brightly because of it. One feels blessed to have the chance to watch O’Toole and Vanessa Redgrave finally onscreen together, a marriage ended long ago one presumes via a mixture of ego and immaturity, but a love that stands the test of time and infidelity.

As the young “Venus” who steals O’Toole’s attention, Jodie Whittaker matches O’Toole’s star power with brazen aplomb. The relationship is a complex mixture of ardor, fondness, lasciviousness and mutual manipulation, two individuals who use one another but actually appear to see one another as well. There are scenes likely to make one squirm in relative discomfort, but the screenplay is so beautifully crafted the fine lines into lewdness and lechery are treaded yet never crossed. They bring out the worst in each other to be sure, but also a glimmer of their best.

Would that the gods could grant Mr. O’Toole another 74 years. Still, one suspects his career is very, very far from nearing its finale.

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More Movie Info: http://imdb.com/title/tt0489327/